About

I have been using Skype for many years.

I'm in touch with many people so over the years I have collected many contacts.

After 2-3 years I started to rename people - I always put which company they work for, what activity they are related to, if they have any skill that I may look for (for example PHP developers) and country.

It's a nice system and it helps me a lot and it's better than nothing.

Recently I have started to organize a big software project and started to hire people from all over the world.

At that moment I got lost.

Many people are from countries where their names are very hard to remember but mainly there are many of them repeating.

Yes I can have excel and write what I agreed with each of them, etc.. But it's not practical.

I want to build an application where it that can open a custom notes field for every Skype contact.

This will not be just a note.

I want to be able to define different fields and profiles, etc., generally to build a database around Skype contact that I can customize.

Once I open a Skype contact window I'll see all the data. And I can see all my data and open Skype from there.

I don't want to build closed system - I'll add option to link automatically external web pages, so if you are programmer or you have IT department you can link ANY of your data via web page with any of the contact - QuickBooks, Salesforce - you name it.

I think this can be really amazing and powerful tool.

Risks and challenges

The main challenge is to recognize the proper contact.

Skype is storing local data and the application should be able to access them. But it can happen then in the future Skype will change they they operate and I'll need to find different tricks to deal with the data.

And if Skype will not like it they can do actions against such application.